Dota 2 had more players yesterday than the rest of the Steam top ten put together

I keep forgetting that Dota 2 hasn’t been released yet. And the reason I keep forgetting is that it’s more massive in beta than any of its rivals could hope to be on launch day. Apart from League of Legends, of course. But take yesterday. If you’d rounded up all the players of the other nine games in Steam’s top ten most-played list, they still wouldn’t have matched the total boasted by Valve’s MOBA.

At its peak yesterday, Thursday May 23, Steam stats showed that 324,555 concurrent users were playing Dota. The rest of the top ten, which included Football Manager 2013, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike and Skyrim, numbered 308,609 at their respective peaks when totted up.

Dota was also bigger than the rest of the top 90 Steam games put together, which mustered 298,382 between them.

Perhaps this is why enterprising Steam users simply can’t give Dota 2 beta invites away: everybody’s already playing it. Are you part of that everybody?

WHO is playing Dota 2 - and LoL - so much? I mean, great for Valve and Riot - I don't mean to start a flame war here (though I'll go on record and say I've played it and absolutely don't get the appeal. You wanna talk addicting multiplayer games, I'm old school. I'll tell you about everything from Bomberman & Worms to Quake 3 Arena. So yeah, I'm no fan). But this is an absurd amount of gamers for either game. For ANY game

There HAVE to be gamers who only play these MOBA's, right? I've got pleny of friends who game on PC, and while some of them play Dota2, there are more of them who could care less. I recall seeing the tournaments for LoL at PAX East last year, and those gamers largely stayed at the LoL tournaments, opting to ignore all the PC games on display. Quality stuff like the indie showcases and Firefall and whatnot. Who are these people? This is like an EVE or WoW thing, isn't it? Where they're not just fans; the game encompasses a huge amount of their lives?

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